A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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guyot
A guyot is a seamount with a flat top, an underwater volcano whose summit was planed off at sea level by waves and which then sank below the surface as the crust it sits on cooled and subsided. The flat top is now typically several hundred to several thousand feet down. They occur in groups and chains, and the depth of the flat surface records how long ago the mountain went under.
Etymology
The word honors Arnold Guyot, a Swiss-American geographer, and it was coined by Harry Hess, who found the features while commanding a transport ship in the Pacific during the Second World War and using the ship’s echo sounder on the way to and from operations. He kept the sounder running continuously and mapped scores of flat-topped mountains.
Notes
What Hess did with the observation matters more than the observation. The flat tops had to have been cut at sea level and were now deep, and were deeper the further they lay from the mid-ocean ridge, which became part of his argument for seafloor spreading and one of the foundations of plate tectonics. Guyots are also where deep-sea corals and sponges concentrate, since a flat summit in a current is prime ground.